The urge to give human bodies sculptural form has been around at least as long as the Venus of Willendorf—which is to say, for about twenty-five thousand years. The Met Breuer starts its story of figurative sculpture a little bit later, in the fourteenth century, with the exhibition “Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body (1300-Now).” The show zeros in on another ancient impulse: to ramp up realism with the application of paint or the addition of fabric. (The Greeks and the Romans did it, and so did Degas, adding a cotton skirt and a satin ribbon to his bronze dancer.) Interspersed with some hundred and twenty sculptures—by artists from Donatello and Rodin to Louise Bourgeois and Isa Genzken—will be wax effigies, mannequins, and anatomical models. (Opens March 21.)

In 1987, Adrian Piper, a native New Yorker who now lives in Berlin, became the first African-American woman to receive tenure as a professor of philosophy (her subject is Kant)—but that’s not why she’s getting a retrospective at MOMA. Piper, who was awarded the Golden Lion at the 2015 Venice Biennale, is a pioneering Conceptualist and performance artist who has been challenging assumptions about race, class, and gender for fifty years. The museum devotes its entire sixth floor to a living artist for the first time with the exhibition “Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965-2016.” (Opens March 31.)

The biomorphic drawings in “Terry Winters: Facts and Fictions,” at the Drawing Center, may appear abstract, but for forty years the Brooklyn-born painter has been heeding the advice of Cézanne: “Treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone.” What’s more, Winters began treating the natural world as an intricately networked system long before digital technologies took over our lives. (Opens April 6.)

The exhibition “Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985,” which comes to the Brooklyn Museum from the Hammer Museum, in L.A., was seven years in the making, yet it feels tailor-made for a cultural moment when women’s voices are finally being heard. Most of the show’s hundred and twenty artists from fifteen countries will be unknown to viewers, including the thirteen from the United States. All of their work is political, and much of it was made in response to repressive governments. (Opens April 13.)

Benedict was nicknamed the Prada Pope because of his penchant for luxury goods, but Pope Francis has traded his predecessor’s ermine-trimmed satin robes for basic white cotton. What, then, does he make of the Met Costume Institute’s upcoming show “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination”? The exhibition, which will extend into the museum’s medieval rooms and continue uptown, at the Cloisters, has the Vatican’s blessing—around fifty items will be on loan from its collection. There are Italian designers, of course, including Valentino, Versace, and Dolce & Gabbana, in addition to garments from Balenciaga, Chanel, and many more, all seen in the context of religious works from the Met’s holdings. (Opens May 10.) ♦

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the year that Adrian Piper received tenure.